DiCaprio and Scorsese Reveal the Films That Inspired Their Movies

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have now made six movies together: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, and last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon. (Seven if you want to count their little-seen short “The Audition.”) The two men have almost 25 years of creative history together — and their own history is informed by film history, as Scorsese loves to give his cast and crew classic film homework to watch to help inform their work and give them a sense of the types of moods and looks he wants to create in his own films.

DiCaprio and Scorsese revealed a little bit of that shared history in a new 15-minute video for Letterboxd where they discuss the various movies that informed DiCaprio’s performances and Scorsese’s own productions. You’ll learn how the Polish classic Ashes and Diamonds pointed the way towards Scorsese’s The Departed, and which William Wyler film was the central inspiration for their approach to Killers of the Flower Moon.

DiCaprio also revealed the one film that he showed to Scorsese that he hadn’t seen before: Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Watch their conversation below:

Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t do a ton of interviews, and I have barely seen him at all talking about Killers of the Flower Moon in part because the actors’ strikes was still going on when the film was released. So it was nice to see him and Scorsese discussing their work together in this loose, informal setting. I’d love to hear them do a full-length commentary track for one of their films this way.

Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream on Apple TV+.